Rebuilding a Home, and a Life: The Posthumous Memoir of Anthony Shadid

When people in the publishing industry say a book is “orphaned,” they mean its editor left before it was finished — quit Random House for HarperCollins, quit Penguin for Knopf, quit the book business altogether. It’s a handy term (not least because it happens all the time), but I wish it weren’t already taken, because it’s precisely the word we need to describe the stranger, rarer, sadder phenomenon suffered this month by Anthony Shadid’s House ofStone.

For anyone who somehow missed the story, Shadid, the Beirut bureau chief for the New York Times, died two weeks ago in Syria. One of the most acclaimed foreign correspondents of his generation, Shadid spent much of 2011 covering the uprisings of the Arab Spring; last month, he and a colleague, photographer Tyler Hicks, snuck into Syria to report on the ongoing violence there. A week later, while attempting to leave, Shadid suffered what seems to have been an asthma attack anddied.

Shadid, 43, left behind a wife and 3-year-old son in Lebanon and a daughter from his first marriage in the United States. Also: a vast archive of stories, two Pulitzer Prizes, two previous books, and 50,000 finished, printed, not-yet-shipped copies of House of Stone. The book was originally scheduled for publication on March 27. Instead, it came out this week, which made it both early and late: a memoir transforming, at the last moment, into amemorial.

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House of Stone is, itself, a book about orphaning, or at any rate about the permanent and devastating ways that the forces of history conspire to separate parents from children, sisters from brothers, lover from beloved. The titular house is located in the town of Jedeidet Marjayoun, in southeastern Lebanon, hard by the Syrian border and the Golan Heights. Shadid’s great-grandfather built it in the early 20th century; by the early 21st century, it was well on its way to ruin. In 2006, Shadid, then with the Washington Post, took a one-year leave from his job to rebuildit.

House of Stone, which chronicles that year, is a strange and often lovely hybrid — one-third memoir, one-third Middle Eastern history, one-third written version of what is more often an oral genre, popular among homeowners worldwide: the Contractor Nightmare Narrative. Shadid, who was born in Oklahoma City, arrives in Marjayoun with visions of restoring the home to Ottoman-era glory. In short order, he is disabused, not to mention just abused: by neighbors who are convinced he’s a spy, friends who second-guess his every architectural and financial decision, and, especially, by the workers themselves. Shadid’s carpenter is “so utterly lacking in punctuality that he measures time in seasons.” His painter turns out to be colorblind. His foreman, one Abu Jean, is 76 years old, prone to tantrums, sublimely indolent, staggeringly imperious, and somehow, despite all that, immenselylikeable.

Just 800 people live in Marjayoun, which makes it one of those small towns where it is possible to be chronically lonely yet have virtually no privacy. Shadid gets by on scotch, cigarettes (enough “to keep the Carolinas out of the meth business”), and precisely the sense of humor one wants in a foreign correspondent: one part self-deprecating, two parts crude, four parts black, served very dry. It’s not right to call House of Stone a funny book; the humor here is too minor, in both senses — a secondary theme in a melancholy key. Yet Shadid is a very funny writer. A cousin’s elaborate exposition on curing olives feels like “a mix of nuclear engineering and Sufi mysticism.” His own efforts at bullying the construction crew into action are so ineffectual that a friend has to show him how it’s done. “You brother of a whore!” the friend shouts, “I fuck your sister!” He then pauses, considers, and recommends stopping there: “I wouldn’t want to bring mothers in at thisstage.”

As Shadid struggles to make a literal and figurative home in this place, he recounts the story of why his ancestors left it. Separate, italicized sections detail the impact on Marjayoun of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, French imperialism, Lebanese independence, and the country’s fifteen-year civil war. Because many of Shadid’s relatives migrated to the United States, we also get a fragment of American history, slender and sharp. The first Shadids arrive when the Statue of Liberty still glows a bright, unoxidized copper and peddling remains a viable trade, “suitable for a country as yet unfamiliar with cars and buses and outlet malls.” Later generations get a green-tinged Lady Liberty and the auto factories of Detroit, “where they were known as Syrians orTurks.”

As House of Stone progresses, the family tree branches down toward Shadid; the main text and italicized sections gradually converge. Only late in the book did I realize that a subtle divergence was happening as well. As Shadid advances his own tale, the house gets ever closer to completion, until he moves in and makes a home. As he advances the historical sections, ancestor after ancestor deserts the house, until, finally, it slides toward abandonment and ruin. The effect is that of a film simultaneously projected forward and backward: the house falls apart and comes together at the sametime.

It is, fittingly, a lovely structure. Or anyway, it’s a lovely structure for a book. But that endless cycle of rebuilding and undoing is also the structure of history, and seen too close-up, over too much time, it can sicken a reporter’s spirit. When House of Stone begins, Shadid has just spent three years covering Iraq. His wife — not coincidentally — has divorced him. He finds himself “stunned by war, and, shockingly, no longer young, or married, or with my daughter.” By the time he reaches Lebanon, he writes, “I was a suitcase and a laptop drifting on a conveyorbelt.”

Has there even been a more concise description of the foreign correspondent at low ebb? The constant travel, the enforced passivity, the grim cyclicality, and above all the dissociation, the sheer thing-ness: on bad days, that’s how war reporters feel about themselves, the job, the region — the whole sweep ofhistory.

Shadid comes to Marjayoun to escape all this, which makes House of Stone unusual among books by journalists. Rather than the culmination of a period of reporting, it is both a respite from the job and, indirectly, an account of the toll that job takes. Part of the book reads like an open letter of love and remorse to his daughter, Laila. “I wanted to be a family man, a generous man,” Shadid writes, “but there was always work.” In reality, the family man was “a kind of guest star, and sometimes, as wars accelerated, I forgot the plot unfurling back there.” He restores the Marjayoun house in part because he cannot rebuild his other neglectedhome.

And there is another lost home here, too. House of Stone is, among other things, a torch song for the Levant, that swath of the Mediterranean that is partly geopolitical reality and partly “a way of living and thinking”: an idea of the Middle East as “open-minded [and] cosmopolitan.” That Middle East, Shadid observes, has now all but vanished, “transformed into a puzzle of political divisions,” engulfed by chronicwar.

Shadid is openly tired of “the dread of yet another conflict,” and in Marjayoun, for the most part, he avoids it. Instead he tends his garden — literally — and wonders when to harvest his olives; the men around him die of cancer and old age. In both tone and content, the book is hushed and meditative, a few adagio measures in the middle of a prestissimo life. Yet the threat of war is always there in the background, “a television turned low.” Even without the book’s backstory — which, at present, feels more like a front story — it would be impossible to shake the sense offoreboding.

I suppose that’s because the endeavor at the heart of House of Stone seems so tragically doomed. Shadid makes hay of the surface craziness of his home-improvement project — the Keystone Cops construction crew, et al. The real craziness, though, is both bigger and simpler than that: the idea that by rebuilding a house, Shadid can somehow restore to wholeness himself, his family, and hishomeland.

That is the ethos familiar to us all from the tale of the three little pigs: Build your house with love and care and strong materials, and nothing can blow it down. But Shadid plainly knows better. In the opening scene of House of Stone, southern Lebanon has just been bombed, and Shadid sets off to assess the damage in Marjayoun. At his great-grandfather’s house — the one he will later determine to rebuild — he finds “a half-exploded Israeli rocket that had crashed into the second story … taking out a good chunk of wall before bursting intoflame.”

Rebuilding and undoing, rebuilding and undoing. Shadid, of all people, knows exactly how fragile a home really is. Yet he goes to a neighbor, borrows a shovel, and plants, in the friable soil and the shadow of a rocket, an olive tree. One year and 300 pages later, it has barely grown; but the house, miraculously, is near completion. And how does Shadid feel about that? “I can already sense it,’” he tells a friend. “I’m going to finish this house and the war will start. I’m going to finish this house and I’ll end up never setting foot in itagain.”

***

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, he left behind the unfinished manuscript that would become his final, posthumous work, The Pale King. Perhaps the novel’s most disconcerting feature is that, at regular intervals, a character named David Wallace pops up to address the reader, announcing each interruption by saying, “Authorhere.”

This is the thing about orphaned books, if I may appropriate the term. They constantly announce the impossible: Author here. The voice on the page persists, innocent of what is about to happen, or rather, what has happened already. As W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats, “the death of the poet / was kept from hispoems.”

Anthony Shadid knew his job could kill him, because it almost did, twice. In 2002, he was shot by a sniper in Ramallah; last year, he and three other journalists were captured and beaten in Libya. Yet only in the epilogue to House of Stone, when he is covering the Arab Spring — and, by all accounts, happy to be back at work — does he talk about the emotional experience of confronting death: of lying with his face in the dirt while above him, a Libyan soldier calmly says, “Shoot them.” What he experienced in that moment was nothing you or I might recognize as mortal terror: “It was emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis ofcreation.”

That sounds almost too writerly to be true, but listen to Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, another best-correspondent-of-his-generation: “I have only ever felt true loneliness … when I have stood alone face-to-face with absolute violent power,” Kapuscinski wrote in Travels with Herodotus. “The world grows empty, silent, depopulated, and finally recedes.” Silence, emptiness, aridity, the antithesis of creation. Death, to both journalists, felt like the end of being able to say something: Author nothere.

I suppose it is banal to point out that all authors cease to be here sooner or later. Yet that is precisely the thing about death: it is banal, just as it is (at least in broad outline) entirely predictable. Only when it explodes into the stone wall of your own home does it become astonishing and terrible. Shadid spent his life trying to bridge that gap; his work insists on the non-banality of other people’s experiences. As House of Stone makes clear, that kind of work takes a remarkable person, a remarkable toll, and a remarkable, impossible faith. As awful as his death is, it comes with a kind of informed consent. Rebuilding and undoing: over and over, Shadid cast his lot with the former, fully knowing the risks and tradeoffs, fully knowing that — straw, sticks, stones, bones — we are all blown away,eventually.

The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday.

Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.”

“A Director of National Intelligence has never prevented a properly submitted whistleblower complaint that the [inspector general] determined to be credible and urgent from being provided to the congressional intelligence committees. Never,” Schiff said in a statement. “This raises serious concerns about whether White House, Department of Justice or other executive branch officials are trying to prevent a legitimate whistleblower complaint from reaching its intended recipient, the Congress, in order to cover up serious misconduct.”

Schiff indicated that he learned the matter involved “potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community,” raising the specter that it is “being withheld to protect the President or other Administration officials.”

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group on Saturday attacked two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including the world’s biggest petroleum processing facility, in a strike that three sources said had disrupted output and exports.

Two sources close to the matter said 5 million barrels per day of crude production had been impacted — close to half of the kingdom’s output or 5% of global oil supply.

The pre-dawn drone attack on the Saudi Aramco facilities set off several fires, although the kingdom, the world’s largest oil exporter, later said these were brought under control.

Candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are sprinting from coast to coast in search of campaign donations over the next 18 days, moving urgently to stockpile cash for their big fall push — and to avoid a death spiral that a weak third-quarter fundraising tally might prompt. …

Still, Democratic donors have expressed nervousness in recent weeks that some presidential hopefuls could post disappointing totals, compounding the candidates’ broader struggles. July and August tend to be slow for fundraising, with many people on vacation and tuned out of politics. The large and unpredictably fluid field also has made it difficult for donors to commit to a candidate.

“The third quarter number, from a finance standpoint, will define the narrative throughout the course of the fall, when these questions about viability for so many of the candidates are so real, especially in the second and third tiers,” said Rufus Gifford, the finance director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaignand a donor to at least three candidates so far this year.

While MIT engages in damage control following revelations the university’s Media Lab accepted millions of dollars in funding from Jeffrey Epstein, a renowned computer scientist at the university has fanned the flames by apparently going out of his way to defend the accused sex trafficker—and child pornography in general.

Richard Stallman has been hailed as one of the most influential computer scientists around today and honored with a slew of awards and honorary doctorates, but his eminence in the academic computer science community came into question Friday afternoon when purportedly leaked email excerpts showed him suggesting one of Epstein’s alleged victims was “entirely willing.”

An MIT engineering alumna, Selam Jie Gano, published a blog post calling for Stallman’s removal from the university in light of his comments, along with excerpts from the email in which Stallman appeared to defend both Epstein and Marvin Minsky, a lauded cognitive scientist and founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab who was accused of assaulting Virginia Giuffre.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young liberal icon from New York, has endorsed Senator Ed Markey’s reelection bid next year, as Representative Joe Kennedy III considers challenging Markey for what promises to be the nation’s most competitive congressional primary.

Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have worked together as the primary sponsors of the Green New Deal, the signature legislative issue for both lawmakers.

ABC’s coverage of the 10-candidate forum draws the largest preliminary ratings for any debate so far this cycle.

ABC and Univision scored strong ratings Thursday with their coverage of the third Democratic presidential primary debate.

The debate, featuring 10 candidates and current frontrunners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sharing the stage for the first time, drew a 10.0 household rating in Nielsen’s 56 metered markets. That’s 23 percent higher than the 8.1 NBC got for part two of the first debate on June 27, but about 25 percent lower than combined metered-market average for NBC and MSNBC. That telecast ended up with 18.1 million viewers across NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo.

Beginning speech to Concerned Women of America, @SecPompeo says “this is such a beautiful hotel. The guy who owns it must gonna be successful along the way,” he says, without mentioning @realDonaldTrump by name. “That was for the Washington Post,” he says of his remark. pic.twitter.com/vPYp9vYE9y

Child care, a key issue for many Americans, is getting little attention at the debates

Millions of Americans struggle to find decent, affordable child care every year. But when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tried to bring up the subject during Thursday’s Democratic debate, in response to a question about education, a moderator cut her off.

“Start with our babies by providing universal child care for every baby age 0 to 5, universal pre-K for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in this country,” Warren said, just getting on a roll when ABC moderator Linsey Davis interrupted. “Thank you, senator,” Davis said.

Davis was just following the rules: Warren’s time for the response had lapsed. But the moment was a perfect metaphor for the attention child care and other work-family issues have gotten in these debates ― or, more accurately, the attention they have not gotten in these debates.

After the debate, Castro is being criticized for his kamikaze attack on Biden, while journalists are toiling away trying to transcribe Biden’s “record player” response

Biden was asked whether he still held these attitudes: “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” What follows is a transcript of his rambling answer (I have omitted nothing), which for some reason includes references to record players and Venezuela:

Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.

Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.